Michelle Taylor

I keep slipping behind on LJ. There are bits of your LJs that I am probably never going to read now. There are posts on your LJs that I wanted to reply to but have been lost in the mists of time. I would like to apologise for this, but I feel that apologising for it would mean that I wouldn't do it again and would try and repair it, and I *could* read everything and reply to everything, but then I would never get my head back.

I kept quite a comprehensive diary of most of Spring Harvest, but I don't have my Psion cable so I can't post that right now. It was entertaining but not necessarily very useful. I seem to be just drifting through life at the moment, but this is probably due to a combination of holiday-itis and my period being due for the first time in two months. I do seem to have lost touch with God to a slightly worrying extent, though.

There was a week between Word Alive and JemCon, but I have no idea what happened to it. In the middle of it there was a Data Connection interview, which was fun. Unfortunately I'd neglected to inform my dad that it would take 4-5 hours, and so he sat in the car the whole time, which had the additional entertaining effect of making the battery flat, causing us to have to call up the AA and sit around in the car for an additional hour. (With no music, because the car battery was dead.) The 'On-Time Repairs' franchise that was doing AA in the area took rather a while and many frantic phone calls to find where we were parked, and then took about thirty seconds with some jump leads to get us going again. Then I ate food which I remembered as nice and edible but which turned out to be full of onions.

JemCon was entertaining. The first night was taken up with playing Munchkin until everyone lost the will to live (and a rather sick and twisted little game called Lunch Money which was the card game of playground fights, although I still maintain it would have been much better if everyone had actually read out the card text in creepy-little-kid voices), and the girls went to the funfair on the way to get food (we went on the carousel and the waltzer, and got whiplash because surprisingly enough the car full of screaming girls got much more attention than the one other that had a little black kid and his dad, meaning we had four guys spinning us around, and were hugely disappointed because they had no bouncy castle and the trampolines were swarming with very small children). The Saturday contained two games (well, four, but running in parallel); I chose the 'conspiricy theories' game (over Deadlands) and the Vampire game (over 'action movies').

The Conspiricy Theories game was a little slow in places, and my hacker character required more thinking than I really felt like doing, but did manage to get beaten up by the party and almost crawl away in time to be the only survivor but then failed their 'get past the bad guy' roll. The Deadlands game looked more interesting, but I don't know if it was. The Vampire game was great fun, as our party consisted of a diablerist, a hippie, a Lasombra and my character, a gangrel-caitiff sociopath. There was lots of killing, in which we discovered that ghouls are much harder opponents than vampires and my character fell into torpor for a couple of months but was rescued by the hippie (the other party members having cut and run).

On Sunday I ran a cut-down version of London Below; the party had the standard introduction, then 'time passes' to level up a couple of times, then had to rescue the fairy girl (which they weren't related to in this case) from the goblins, having been sent by the druids. They insisted on trying to wander up and down the tube tracks a few times trying to rescue the girl, which meant they had to be rescued by Darkhunters once and took down a patrol of Drow despite only being 2nd level characters *but then just went back to Keshton and lost all their progress down the track rather than carrying on*. Um. I was quite astounded by the stupidity of that last move, but it did let me give them some Bardic Knowledge and Gather Information to get them on the track I thought they'd take after they got vampired. I'd invited dr_vannacutt along but he decided to play Lunch Money instead of a game he'd already seen the first bit of.

That went on slightly later than I was planning, so it was really quite late by the time I set out across London to attempt to get home. I'd carefully planned out a route on the map beforehand, but unfortunately was scuppered by the A10 having inconvenient one-way bits, and ended up wandering around until I found the A1 and got out onto the M25 a couple of junctions down.

For the last couple of days I have mostly been sleeping, prodding my email, and playing computer games.

I like conferences. They mean I get interesting things like 'guinea-fowl in red wine sauce' to eat in Hall. Even if 'guinea-fowl' is just like slightly rubbish chicken.

Took my poor car to the garage today, had some mechanics do £52 of incomprehensible things to it, which apparently have fixed the boot door and the gear linkage problem that was making it slip out of first gear, but not the squeak because it was doing the whole 'act nice for the mechanics' thing, or the passenger door because that required a part replacing which cost over £50 on its own.

Went to the doctor's on Monday; they recommended that I switch contraceptive pills and told me that the new ones were safe to take for two months in a row. So that was some useful information. Shame I got the appointment time wrong due to having temporarily misplaced my Psion, and hence ended up sitting in the waiting room for an hour listening to old ladies talk about a new housing development and reading back issues of 'Woman' and a National Geographic from 1994. Managed to actually get my prescription on the way to pick up the car, although still forgot to go to the dentist's and work out what Paperwork of Doom I require to get registered with them.

So I did most of the things I had planned for today, although I really need to stop procrastinating on writing CVs. The problem is, I have now written them for the two companies I actually want to work for, so I'm less enthusiastic about doing so for the four or so others which I feel I ought to apply to. The dreaded meh appears to have worn off, though, which is good.

My father believes my car may be slightly ailing (as do most of the people who've been forced to travel in it lately). Apparently I should 'get it looked at'. However, I have no idea how to go about doing so, for a reasonable price, in Cambridge. I attempted to look into it via Google but the wealth of conflicting information bewildered me, and everyone only seems to be interested in doing full service packages which I don't think is the right thing (and is definitely expensive). I know that at least one of you has a car in Cambridge; any advice?